What's wrong with wanting smaller taxes and government?

Smaller taxes and government are the keystones of American conservatism, right?

Many, many Americans certainly agree. It's practically in our DNA. At the time of the Founding Fathers most Americans were farmers, and were practically self-sufficient except for luxuries.

We needed government to defend us from military attack from abroad (or from Indians). We didn't want King George ordering us around from the other side of the Atlantic.

Okay, fine. And we certainly don't want a gigantic Soviet-style bureacracy telling us where to scratch and forcing our neighbors to spy on us (and us on them). And making us slaves to the State, with any initiative squelched, like the situation today in, say, North Korea.

So--what's the right balance today?

Isn't it reasonable to say that we need enough government to protect us against whoever and whatever seriously threatens us, and to maintain our competitiveness in the global economy, and no more?

Now--does that include the postal service? If it's run as a for-profit enterprise, it will make sense to cut out rural deliveries nationwide, and only deliver mail where there's enough volume to make it profitable--mainly in urban areas.

I live in an urban area, so my ox wouldn't be gored if we did that, but I'm willing to pay a bit extra for postage stamps in order to maintain truly nationwide service. I've been in countries where mail service is iffy at best. They're third world countries. I'd prefer not to live in a third world country.

So what else do we need (besides enough military to defend us against invasion)?

Well, suppose you discover that you can light your tapwater on fire. (I've seen footage of this.) And you discover that it's almost certainly because of frakking nearby. Frakking is a natural gas drilling procedure that runs a line underground, then pumps a mixture of water and toxic chemicals through it at high pressure, fracturing the surrounding rock and releasing the natural gas. Unfortunately the process can also pollute the water table--hence the flammable tapwater.

And then you discover that your state legislature passed a law exempting natural gas producers from getting prosecuted--or sued--for contaminating water tables with frakking.

And that this has being going on in many of the 35 states where frakking is being done.

That's where you need an entity as powerful as the natural gas producers who have outsourced their problems to you--and nothing but the national government can do that.

The Framers didn't envision natural gas producers harming thousands of rural homeowners. But they did envision the country having needs they couldn't envision. So they made the Constitution more like a stem cell than like a whole creature--the Constitution's brevity makes it flexible enough to enable government to tackle unforeseen threats like this.

Now of course the more government you have, the more taxes you get.

But taxes don't matter.

What I mean is that your income, your safety, and your discretionary purchasing power are what matter. If I pay a lot of taxes and have X amount of discretionary income, or pay a lot less taxes but have to buy more necessities--like health insurance--and have Y amount of discretionary income, and Y is less than X, I'd be better off paying more taxes and less of the rest.

This isn't an argument for the dreaded Welfare State that maintains an entire class of people on the dole for all their lives.

But without a powerful federal government that provides reasonable regulation of the activities of the rich and powerful, what you get--inevitably--is a class of people who live off you all their lives--the hyper-rich who take advantage of lack of government regulation to hitch a ride on the tax dollar gravy train, and then take your pocketbook for much, much more of a ride than all the inner city welfare bums in the country put together.

As Wall Street's "Masters of the Universe" recently demonstrated.

And you should consider the fact that such "Masters of the Universe" ceaselessly lobby Congress and propagandize the American public to remove all business regulations, working on you to think as if you're a farmer in 18th century America and "government" = King George.

Bottom line: there is always power. If government wields less power, be totally assured that someone else will grab whatever power the government surrendered, and often use it against you.

It's a big, complex world today. Russian criminal rings probe the Internet and the e-mailverse nonstop, trying to steal your ID and every cent you have. Illegal aliens may be using your Social Security number right now, and you might not discover the problem until you retire and try to start collecting Social Security. Today, here in Calfornia, the giant power utility Pacific Gas & Electric has placed an initiative on our ballot with the sole purpose of making it vastly more difficult for municipalities to stop using PG&E--and backing it up with a saturation ad campaign.

I realize you may have had a bad experience with surly, indifferent government employees (who may not evens peak intelligible English) the last time you went to the Post Office or the Department of Motor Vehicles.

On the other hand, I remember the time my spouse had to choose between 10 days in the hospital or 10 days of anticoagulant shots, and we chose the latter, in part to save our healthcare provider the enormous cost of that hospitalization--which they would have been on the hook for--and yet they refused to pay the $1,500 the shots cost...because they could get away with it, and it helped their bottom line.

Nongovernmental entities are trying to rob you or shortchange you or overcharge you or even kill you (by refusing to pay for needed medical care) all the time, even right under you nose.

So when all those dangers vanish, I'll get on the "small government/taxes" bandwagon.

In other words, Jefferson was a nice guy, and really smart--but Hamilton was more correct, in the long run.